Movies - Total Recall

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	Movies - Total Recall

Total Recall is an American science fiction film released on June 1, 1990 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Ronald Shusett, Dan O'Bannon, Jon Povill and Gary Goldman. It won a Special Achievement Academy Award for its visual effects. It was based on the novelette We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick. At the time of its production Total Recall had the largest authorized budget for a film produced by a Hollywood studio. Despite its violence the film's success confirmed Schwarzenegger as a major box office draw and relaunched Sharon Stone's career.

Synopsis

Schwarzenegger plays Douglas Quaid, a construction worker in the mid-21st century, living an ordinary life with his wife Lori (Stone). Quaid is plagued with an obsession about Mars, so he purchases a virtual vacation on Mars from the Rekall company, who will implant false memories of a vacation to Mars in his mind. The procedure apparently goes wrong, and Quaid finds himself pursued by killers led by Richter (Michael Ironside), and Lori, who had merely been posing as his wife, and is actually Richter's girlfriend. Quaid is presented with a video message from his "real" self, Hauser, who had been chief of security on Mars. What Quaid learns from the video forces him to actually go to Mars, where he joins the struggle against the corrupt, oppressive Mars Administrator, Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox). With the help of the mutant telepath Kuato, Quaid discovers the hidden knowledge that he had in his previous life. Cohaagen has found an ancient alien artifact that will release oxygen into the Martian atmosphere to make it habitable. Cohaagen will stop at nothing to make sure this does not happen, as he will be able to control every part of martian citizenry, holding the trump card of oxygen deprivation in the case of unrulyness. In the end, it turns out that everything that happened was planned beforehand by Cohaagen and Hauser, as a plan to find and kill Kuato, and end his rebellion. The plan succeeds, but before Quaid is destroyed forever and once again made into Hauser, he escapes his captors, activates the artifact, and frees Mars. However, the "real" events on Mars are uncannily like the events described in the implanted vacation that he purchased, so that even at the conclusion, the viewer is not entirely sure what the reality of the situation is.

The film explores the question of whether what is happening to the hero is reality or is a delusion being fed to his brain. A similar theme is found in the movies The Matrix
, eXistenZ and Vanilla Sky
. With a nod to Alice in Wonderland, both this movie and The Matrix
have a sequence where the hero is offered a red pill that will symbolically alter their perception of reality from the new one they are experiencing to the one they were used to.

Real...

A strong case for Quaid's journey being real is that the film is not told from his perspective. Viewers are aware of events that Quaid could only be oblivious to.

On the special edition DVD commentary by director Paul Verhoeven, he states that using Arnold as opposed to others who had been considered (Richard Dreyfuss, Patrick Swayze) leans more towards the film being real, as audiences would not want Arnold in an action film that turned out to only be a dream.

In an interview with Starlog magazine, Schwarzenegger stressed the challenge of acting in the film, "Because you're not coming in with the same character that you're going out with. Hauser's an interesting character, but Quaid's just this big program ..." This suggests that the events on Mars were real.

One last idea cementing the idea that the story was not simply a figment is also from the DVD commentary when director Verhoeven and star Schwarzenegger discuss how they wanted to do a sequel (which later got turned into Minority Report
), using Quaid as the hero of a firm that uses psychics (Martian mutants brought back to Earth for the proposed Verhoeven/Schwarzenegger sequel, Precogs in the Spielberg/Tom Cruise film) to solve crimes before they happen. There would be no way to do this sequel if the events on Mars in the film hadn't been real.

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